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The Current Transcript for March 21, 2018

Host: Laura Lynch

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

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VOICE 1: Eat and sleep well. Giving, accepting affection, cuddling, and that reminded me of an ad for puppies in the paper.

VOICE 2: But those are not puppies. They're children.

VOICE 1: I know.

LAURA LYNCH: They were children. Indigenous children swept up in the so-called Sixties Scoop when Nora Cummings, then head of the Saskatchewan Native Women's Association, saw the newspaper ads for the first time. She couldn't quite believe it. The CBC's Connie Walker spoke to her and many others in the course of her new podcast Finding Cleo. And she's here today to talk about what she discovered and how those who took the children and then adopted them out still believe what they did was best for them and the families they left behind. Before that though another tale of being left behind.

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There was no ride. I had no way to come pick me up. They just drove me to the Tim Horton’s and the gas station and pointed in the direction of which way I hitchhike.

LL: Serena Woods had no way to get home after being driven 2 hours away from Fredericton in the course of serving a short sentence for failing to pay a 200 dollar fine. Her case has become the focus of debate and argument in New Brunswick about whether in fact there is extra punishment for those who are poor. And stay with us for a searing look inside Syria from a journalist who has spent most of her life there since the civil war erupted with protests, seven years ago.

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The bloodbath does continue but it's in the small acts, things like going back home and wanting to improve your community despite the war planes in the air that highlights the resilience of Syrians.

LL: Author Rania Abuozeid's new book No Turning Back: Life Loss and Hope in Wartime Syria shares intimate tales of people living through war, people she has come to know well including a young girl who becomes over the course of seven years a young woman, and a privileged man who after protesting is jailed tortured and then makes his escape. Rania joins me in our last half hour. I'm Laura Lynch sitting in for Anna Maria Tremonti. And this is The Current.

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Advocates call for empathetic police practices after Fredericton woman left stranded by jail staff

Guests: Lynn Brown, Charles Murray, Douglas King

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You just gonna let me go to some place I don't even know. A woman out, and tell me to hitchhike, give me a Google map and leave me to my own devices.

LL: Serena Woods of Fredericton New Brunswick says she was stranded in Miramichi 200 kilometres from home by provincial jail staff. Her story starts the previous day when she was panhandling and taken into custody by police. She couldn't pay her two fines totalling 200 dollars and so she spent the night in a holding cell before being taken to the New Brunswick Women's Correctional Centre in Miramichi the following day. And though she says she was released almost as soon as she got there, she had no way to make the 200 kilometre trip back home and says jail staff wouldn't help her.

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So there was nothing open, no buses, no... No anything. They told me they couldn't keep me because it wasn't a hotel and I would have gladly stayed the one extra night just to get a ride home, shackled and everything. But no. Then they gave me a ride to the gas station and that was it. I sat there and wondered what the hell am I going to do. And finally these two truckers came in. They were from the same company and they were driving together, so they gave me a ride to Monkton and I felt safe. But it was dark when I got to Monkton and I swear I asked everybody, I had to go knock on doors, on truck doors you know 'are you going to Fredericton?' and it was like 'No no no'. Then 10:00 at night. This gentleman walked into the Shell station. So he told me that he was going to Fredericton, so he drove me home. I got home safe. I was lucky to run into safe, nice people but I can't tell you that that would be the same for everybody that gets let out of the jail and left to their own devices.

LL: According to that province's Department of Justice Transportation upon release from jail is the offender's responsibility. Serena Wood's story however has raised questions about whether she was treated fairly. Among those who say she wasn't, one of the truckers who picked her up. This is Victor Poirier.

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A somewhere along the line people have to treat people like human beings. This story has been coming around and around and around it just everyone forgets that bad things can happen to people. Well I don't forget. So when I see she needed help I gave her help that she needed. they kicked her out , out in the street.

LL: Lynn Brown also has questions about the way Serena Woods was treated. Last summer her daughter was released from the New Brunswick Women's Correctional Center in Miramichi, after serving two weeks behind bars for mischief and damaging property. She too feared she would be left stranded in the city far from her home. Lynn Brown is with us from Fredericton. Hello.

LYNN BROWN: Hi.

LL: How far is the Miramichi jail from where your daughter lives?

LYNN BROWN: Oh goodness it's a two hour drive. I'm not quite sure of the mileage but it's a good two hour drive.

LL: Now tell me what happened as her release date was approaching.

LYNN BROWN: She called me and said she was being released on a certain day and wanted to know would I come and get her or could I possibly do something to get her make sure she got home. So I said yes but I didn't realize they do have a commissionaires there that you could put money in for inmates, but to put forty dollars for the bus it cost me 50. Because whatever it's called at the post office charges you 5.95 and then Synergy, which is a company who handles inmates’ money, charges you four dollars. If that inmate doesn't have anybody to put that 40 dollars in their account then they're out on the street and they're walking home.

LL: Why was your daughter so concerned about getting that ride back home to Fredericton?

LYNN BROWN: Oh she was unable to hitchhike. First of all like everybody says, she's a female and it is not safe, and secondly, she has a very serious back problem that she couldn't possibly ever walk that far or stand out in the elements and stand with her thumb in the air. Once those girls or kids or whoever serves her sentence, are out on the street, they're no longer the province's problem.

LL: What concerns you about how your daughter was released?

LYNN BROWN: Well it concerns me not so much with her because I did I was able to have the money. But what if I didn't have the money? What if? What if that was at a time in the months when I didn't have five cents, I couldn't get five cents until the next pension checks came in. What if? She would have had to hitchhike home, taking her chances. I don't know what I would have done. I probably would have lost my mind thinking about my child, even though she's 40, out hitchhiking and it's just not safe. It concerns me for every female that's there.

LL: So tell me what changes you'd like to see in the way that inmate release happens.

LYNN BROWN: I would like to see a system set up where they transport them there and every day the sheriff's van travels from Miramichi back to Fredericton and probably other places I'm sure. I would like to see them come up with some way that they could transport these women back to where they came from. If they're arrested in Fredericton then they need to be brought back to Fredericton. If they are arrested and Woodstock, they need to be brought back to Woodstock, or wherever.

LL: Is it reasonable to expect corrections staff to drive these people far distances upon their release?

LYNN BROWN: Well I think it is because, like I said, those buses those shares fans travel every day that distances sometimes with only one or two people right.

LL: But I understand that this is your daughter and you have strong feelings about this, but there are some who might look at this situation and say 'well this this is somebody who broke the law. This is somebody who is in jail because she did something wrong. Why do we owe it to her to give her a ride?

LYNN BROWN: I know they broke the law but they're still humans. They're human beings and we can't put humans at risk in our society. It's just not right.

LL: And what did your daughter say to you when you got her home safe and sound?

LYNN BROWN: Oh she was appreciative for sure. She said I don't know what I would have done because I would have just been out there hitchhiking and she would have been concerned about that.

LL: Lynn Brown thank you very much for talking to us.

LYNN BROWN: Oh you're welcome any time.

LL: Bye bye.

LYNN BROWN: Bye.

LL: Lynn Brown is in Fredericton.

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She was transported by the province to Miramichi she told to make her own way home from a gas station. And I'm told it's not the only such case recently. So my question for the Premier: 'Is this true? What is their policy? And what is this province doing to ensure that people that they have taken under care are not exposed to greater risk?

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LL: Serena Woods' story has also made it to the floor of the New Brunswick legislature. Speaking in French, justice minister Denis landry's said his department will review why she was left stranded so far from home. Charles Murray is also considering an investigation into what happened. He is New Brunswick's ombudsman and he's in Fredericton. Hello.

CHARLES MURRAY: Good morning.

LL: What was your reaction when you heard about what happened to Serena Woods?

CHARLES MURRAY: I think I had the reaction that every ordinary New Brunswicker would have which was a very sinking feeling in my stomach and just a feeling of 'oh dear I'm afraid this is true and surely we can do better as a province and as a society than this'.

LL: Well do you have any sense of how common it is for someone in New Brunswick to be stranded a distance from home upon release from jail?

CHARLES MURRAY: I don't think it's completely uncommon. I think policy as they say was followed in this particular case. I think it was the combination of the short notice and the circumstances and really this woman's poverty who made her especially vulnerable as a result of how this policy was implemented.

LL: Well we just heard from Lynn Brown who said that she believed her daughter would have also had to hitchhike if she hadn't managed to scrape together 50 dollars for bus fare. What do you make of that story?

CHARLES MURRAY: I think that's exactly in the same line which is that the unique circumstances of people with limited resources means that we need to, as a society, think about what extra steps we need to do to keep them safe. For many people with resources being let off at the bus station would be an inconvenience at most. They would have the resources to get themselves home or to have someone come and pick them up. But for those who are on the margins of our society this represents possible risk and this is what occurred in this case.

LL: Well let's step backwards a little bit. What is the government policy on transportation for people who have just been released from jail and are far from home?

CHARLES MURRAY: The government policy is that transportation home is the responsibility of the inmate and that those inside the institution may assist in letting them contact certain individuals to line that up. But basically it is the inmates’ responsibility.

LL: Well what do you think officials should have done? Serena Woods was saying there that she would have been happy to stay another night in shackles in order to arrange for transportation. What should officials have done differently?

CHARLES MURRAY: There's a number of things that should have been done differently in my view in this case. One of the first is that if it was clear that she was going to be released as soon as she reached Miramichi, she didn't need to be transported from Fredericton to Miramichi in the first place. But secondly at the point at which this individual was indicating her distress and the fact that she didn't have a realistic way to get home an extra step needs to be taken. People need to just take off their hats as employees and put on their hats as New Brunswickers or as human beings and say 'What can we do now'. And there are agencies both inside government and in the volunteer sector which would step up to help. But that wasn't done in this case.

LL: Now that's an interesting question because you say she should never have been taken there in the first place. Do you have any idea why she was transported to Miramichi when she was virtually let go right when she got there?

CHARLES MURRAY: I think they followed sort of a standard protocol. They had her in for overnight. And Fredericton will not hold past a certain point and they said 'well and from this point now she goes to Miramichi' but the phone call wasn't made to Miramichi to discuss what would happen to her case upon arriving at Miramichi. Had that call been made, the people in Miramichi would have quickly confirmed will she will now get credit for that time served and be released immediately. And I think everyone could have been spared a lot of trouble.

LL: Any idea why that phone call wasn't made?

CHARLES MURRAY: I really don't. And that's one of the questions that we're posing to the department and asking them to follow up on. But past the fact that people may make individual mistakes, we want to be a culture inside government where people feel that they have empowerment to do the right thing, to do the thing as human beings that they feel should be done and that the department will back them when they do that. I look at the truckers. It's not their job to transport this woman but they saw a person in need. And they stepped up. The disappointing thing in this case is that the people we employ as a province to look after these people didn't see their duty in the same way.

LL: And we reached out to New Brunswick Ministry of Justice and Public Safety and they said they can't comment on individual cases but they did send us a written statement which says in part: "Upon completion of sentence staff within the facility's work with inmates on discharge planning. We cannot keep them an extra day or extra time. This is true whether they're in jail one night or two years". They then add: "Corrections Facility will support the offender in their responsibility to arrange planning for transportation and housing by connecting them with family or community resources. If an inmate cannot develop a transportation plan the correctional facility will transport him or her to a central public transportation location within the community, for instance, to a bus station." What do you make of that response?

CHARLES MURRAY: I read a lot of policies in my work and words on paper mean a certain thing but the question I often asked the department is how do those words on paper work in the real world? Are you as a department, as a minister, comfortable with what happened in this case as a result of those words on that paper? My own feeling and I think the feeling of most New Brunswickers, this is not what we're about as a society. This is not the standard to which we like to hold ourselves. So if policy needs to change to change that, if the culture inside the department needs to change to change that, let's make those changes because this kind of conduct is really not acceptable.

LL: You just made a statement about what public standards are in New Brunswich but how much public sympathy do you think there is for inmates and for how they get home impoverished or not?

CHARLES MURRAY: I certainly think there's a small group of people who will always say when dealing with inmates 'Look these people have committed crimes and I really don't have much sympathy for them'. So whether it's a question of what food they receive in the institution or what training they receive or this particular case there's not a lot of sympathy. I think this case we really have to ask ourselves what is an appropriate punishment for someone. We understand that this woman is going to spend a night in jail. But in addition to that is it an appropriate punishment for a crime that your safety be placed at risk, that you be dropped off a couple of hours or three hours from home and given a Google map and told this is the way you're going to hitchhike? Does that strike people as an appropriate response to a crime? I don't think you need to be soft on crime or some sort of bleeding heart person to say gosh that is really not a way of treating people with humanity in a way that reflects our values as a society. It's not about the criminal. It's about who we are as a people.

LL: Mr. Murray thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us.

CHARLES MURRAY: Thank you for your interest.

LL: Charles Murray is New Brunswick's ombudsman. He was in Fredericton. Douglas King has been listening in on our conversation. He is a lawyer doing advocacy work for low income and marginalized people as the executive director of the Together Against Poverty Society in Victoria B.C. and he joins us from there. Hello.

DOUGLAS KING: Good morning.

LL: In your work as a legal advocate how often have you come across cases where people released from custody were released from custody in a way that left them in a vulnerable or an unsafe situation.

DOUGLAS KING: I wish I could say this was an isolated incident but I think anyone who works in the non-profit sector relating to people who have spent time in custody knows that it is - for the most part I would say the norm. It's not just with provincial corrections. It really is all the way down the line to local police stations - for the most part when people are released from custody they're not given hardly if any resources to make the next step.

LL: Can you tell us about some of the cases that you have come in contact with?

DOUGLAS KING: Well certainly one example would be we had an individual who was taken into custody related to an incident in the home that after time spent in custody they were released from custody and they weren't actually given any shoes they were given their clothes back. They were taken to a city bus, put on the bus and then the police actually informed everybody on the bus that this individual was being released for custody and that they should basically watch out for him, these kinds of experiences. You know they leave their mark on people. And when we talk about corrections and the concept of corrections we really need to be asking ourselves when we release people from custody , are we actually setting them up to do better and to not go back into custody? Or when we release them or are we essentially setting them up to her for a return?

LL: Well Charles Murray was suggesting that the people who are being affected here are people who are by and large poor. Who is usually affected as far as you know?

DOUGLAS KING: I mean absolutely when we talk about social conditions and people's place in society there are very different experiences for people who live on the margins. And when I look at this case I think it's very important question to hear about how she was released from custody. But I have to ask why is this person in custody in the first place. We're talking about someone who is a panhandler, who was ultimately arrested for not being able to pay fines and that's not supposed to happen in Canada.

LL: You talked about provincial correctional centers. Do you know what policy is for correctional centres across the country?

DOUGLAS KING: Well there really is very little uniform policy across the country. And we see that with local police departments especially. You might find a very very different policy from one department to another. We are starting to see a bit more progression in terms of how policy is made at the provincial level and we would certainly encourage government to start looking at more provincial and national policies and how people are released from custody. It's certainly not a situation where you can expect one thing or another. I think everybody who is being released from custody has different experiences.

LL: So ideally what kind of standards or regulations would you like to see put in place around custody release?

DOUGLAS KING: Well I think like I said before if you're talking about corrections for the purpose of actually trying to correct the reason why the person was in custody in the first place, we need to be asking ourselves as a society what kind of supports are we putting in place. You know not just in services somebody in their physical ability to transport back to their location but if somebody doesn't have a home, if they're homeless what kind of supports are in place to give them that income or to give them housing so that they're not in a situation where they re-offend.

LL: Let me put the same question to you about whether the correctional authorities or the police have an obligation since these are people who did in fact break the law.

DOUGLAS KING: In that regard I actually think there is a greater obligation on the people who create the laws in the first place. You know when you look at a case like Serena Woods you're talking about someone who was panhandling and that's really survival behaviour. People who are poverty who are living on the margins they engage in this type of behaviour because they have to. But we continually create laws, by laws especially, which punish that behaviour. And that's the reason why she was taken into police custody in the first place.

LL: In your experience what do you find to be the attitude of police and correctional authorities in these kinds of cases? Do they want to help? Are they hamstrung by regulation?

DOUGLAS KING: I think it really depends on who you get. And that's one of the problems our laws are so broadly worded especially when you talk about bylaws that it really comes down to the individual police officer in the first place to use discretion. Some of them of course are going to be good with that and some of them are not. What we really need to do is look at the very very beginning of this equation. Why this person was brought into custody in the first place? And ask ourselves well why are we punishing that behaviour in that way in the first place? Why were the police in a position where they could arrest somebody for panhandling and then failing to pay fines? And I think the answer is because we've created these bylaws that give the police the power to do that. And that's where we need to make the change.

LL: Just briefly we only have about 20 seconds left. Have you made your case to the authorities about making changes on this?

DOUGLAS KING: It's a very hard case to make because it really is a philosophical change. It really goes down to the way that we create laws in this country. It's easy for politicians to create a law that says everything is illegal and we'll let police sort it out. And that needs to change especially when it comes to byelaws in our municipalities. We should be looking at targeted laws that really get to the heart of the problem and not be simply passing on the power of police to use their discretion in cases like this. You know it may be in the wrong way.

LL: We'll have to leave it there. Thank you.

DOUGLAS KING: Thank you.

LL: Douglas King is a lawyer and executive director of the Together Against Poverty Society in Victoria British Columbia. Well the CBC News is coming up next. Then CBC journalist Connie Walker joins me with a story she started looking out while working on her podcast Missing and Murdered: Finding Cleo. The story of the Adopt Indian and Metis Program in the 1960s and 70s. It is quite a tale. Stay tuned. I'm Laura Lynch and you're listening to The Current.

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An Indigenous family's fight to find the truth about Cleo, their sister taken in Sixties Scoop

Guest: Connie Walker

LL: Hello I'm Laura Lynch and you're listening to The Current.

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LL: Still to come. It happened last week. A sad anniversary. Seven years since the start of the Syrian civil war. The geopolitics of the conflict are impossibly complex but the human suffering involved is all too easy to understand. In about half an hour from now I'll be joined by one of the war's veteran journalists, Rania Abouzeid, who spent so much time in Syria over the last seven years that her reporting and regular life began to blur. She'll join us to bring us some of those human stories. But first, Finding Cleo.

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ANNOUNCER: Give a new life to a child in your home. Contact AIM.

LL: A that's a TV ad from the late 1960s. It shows kids playing ball, learning the piano, riding horses and the kids are all indigenous. It's an ad for the Adopt Indian and Metis Program, also known as AIM. It was an initiative in Saskatchewan at a time when the number of Indigenous children in foster care was rising rapidly and permanent homes were hard to find. Cyril MacDonald, Saskatchewan's Minister of Welfare at the time, made a direct TV appeal when the programme was announced in 1967.

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One of the main reasons people have given for hesitating to take Indian and Metis children in their home is the fear of the possibility of discrimination against the child in the community itself. This is the job of our educational program; to educate people regarding the culture of the Indian and Metis to reduce the possibility of prejudice against them. After all Indian children have the same protection as white. The only difference is the colour of their skin.

LL : Cleo Semaganis and her five siblings were just a few of the many Indigenous children placed into non-indigenous homes by AIM and Cleo's story is being told in a new CBC podcast Missing and Murdered: Finding Cleo is rolling out this month, with several episodes being released today. Connie Walker is the podcast host and writer and she is with me now. Hello.

CONNIE WALKER: Good morning.

LL: Now I want to hear more about the AIM program. But first can you tell us briefly about Cleo and what you set out to find in your latest podcast.

CONNIE WALKER: Sure. Cleo was a young Cree girl from Saskatchewan and she and all of her siblings were separated from their family and their birthmother, in 1974, and adopted into white homes and basically scattered across North America. Sometime after that her family back in Saskatchewan got word that she had been killed. They believed that she was murdered while she was trying to hitchhike back home to Saskatchewan. But that's all they've known for decades. And because all of Cleo and her siblings were adopted, their names were changed that they didn't know where she went or what her name was, just this terrible story about her tragic death. And so we've spent the last year investigating and we've been working on this podcast called Missing and Murdered.

LL: So these children they were caught up in a wave of apprehensions which all of us know as the Sixties Scoop now and that led to AIM. What was behind this program?

CONNIE WALKER: Well I want to start out by saying that it was actually very difficult to find people who were associated with his program to talk to us on the record. You know we're hearing more and more about the devastating consequences of children who were apprehended and who went through the Sixties Scoop and it's become quite controversial. You know the Saskatchewan government is going to be apologizing so it was a bit difficult to find somebody to go on the record. But we were able to speak to a man named Otto Dreidger. At the start of the program, he was the director of Child Welfare in Saskatchewan. And our interview was the first time that Otto spoke about the AIM program since he left in 1969. He says when it started there were about 2500 to 3000 kids in foster homes.

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Many of them didn't stay in the same foster home for the whole period of time. Some of them were up to 10 or 15 foster homes. They don't develop an identity and they don't develop security and stability. So our thinking was what we need to do is develop a program that will focus on getting basically many Indian children into adoption homes because the white children that went [unintelligible] were already adopted. Not all of them but we also work on those but this was the main. And the objective was to get as many adoption homes as possible in the First Nations communities for First Nations kids. There was some success in that but the majority of adoption homes- because we made a very strong initiative in trying to get people to recognize that the children needed permanent homes. And that was the objective.

LL: How were they trying to find the homes for these children?

CONNIE WALKER: Well they had a pretty effective PR campaign. Essentially they paid an advertising agency to create these ads that ran on the radio and on television and weekly in newspapers. You know they're clear about trying to get people to open their minds and open their homes. And you know it seemed to be quite successful. You know mostly white families were adopting Indian and Metis kids but there was a big backlash from indigenous groups at the time. Nora Cummings was president of the Saskatchewan Native Women's Association and she was an advocate for First Nations and Metis woman. And she learned about the AIM program and the newspaper ads when she met Cleo's mom, Lillian. And she was working with her and went to pick her up one day and this is what happened.

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NORA CUMMINGS: She came out of her house, [unintelligible] many memories and she was holding the newspaper. She was crying. 'Guess what's wrong?' She said. 'These are my babies'. I said 'Are you sure?' And she said 'Those are my babies. Honest to God my babies'.

PRODUCER: So she was holding a newspaper.

NORA CUMMINGS: She was holding it like this. It was her children, AIM ads. And it was sad very sad to see her like that. And she held onto that paper for ever, I thought. Wherever she went she carried her little paper with her children and she'd tell people these are my children.

LL: That is so sad. And what did the adds look like?

CONNIE WALKER: We actually found the ad that Lillian saw in the paper that day. She opened up the paper and saw her children. It was a picture of her two daughters Annette and April and they had been dressed up and their hair was permed and it was an adoption photo of them. And you know all of the ads had a big photo of the children that were up for adoption. And a little blurb about them. They were all very similar. And Nora had copies of other ads that she's collected over the years. And she read one of them to me.

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NORA CUMMINGS: Three and four year old brothers and they talk about how they are accustomed them to rough and tumble play, really quite close and protective to each other but enjoy the outdoors and have excellent health and eat and sleep well, giving, accepting affection. And that they reminded me of ad for little puppies in the paper.

PRODUCER: But those are not puppies. They are children.

NORA CUMMINGS: I know. But and then this is Gene has dark hair, curly dark hair and complex and large frame. And then the same as the brother. An adoption home is now being sought for both. And you know like to me I think they could have been different ways and this is what really bothered me. If the Department of Social Services were apprehending our children and taking our children and trying to find homes, there should have been a better way of doing that, if people were interested in adopting them. To us it was like very discriminatory, putting our children. There not only our children who were apprehended, there was non-Aboriginal children that would- you never seen their pictures in a paper. It was only all our brown faces that were in there.

CONNIE WALKER: So Nora and Lillian, Cleo's mom, got a group of women together for a meeting with the minister of Saskatchewan social services to protest the ads and to protest the AIM program in general.

LL: And how successful were they in getting it changed?

CONNIE WALKER: I would say they were mildly successful. Obviously Lillian wasn't successful in getting her children back. They were all ended up adopted into white families and scattered across North America. She did reconnect with them as adults. But for her it wasn't necessarily a happy ending. For Nora, it was the beginning of what became years of advocacy against the AIM program. You know they were calling for a change in the system, not just a change in this advertising program, but they wanted to create native homes for Native children. They want to give more control to indigenous organisations to help support mothers so that children wouldn't be taken from the home, so that there could be more support for Indigenous women. She wrote proposal after proposal to various levels of government; federal and provincial, trying to create programs for Indigenous mothers to help support them to keep their kids. But the government response differed. There were some memos that we read that were completely dismissive of the idea that their culture was even in need of protecting. But they did eventually bow to pressure and agreed to change the name of AIM from adopt Indian and Metis, to AIM Center. And the tone and the message of the ads changed too. This is an ad from 1973.

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CHILD 1: A child that lives with caring parents to be considered.

CHILD 2: A child that lives with affection, learns to love.

ANNOUNCER: A child that lives with permanent loving parents has a good beginning. And that's the goal of AIM Center, a permanent home through adoption for the children with special needs, the children who are still waiting. If you would like to adopt a child who waits because of his race or age or physical handicap or a learning problem or if you would consider adopting a family group, contact an AIM Center office part of the Department of Social Services. Help a child find his way home through adoption.

CHILD 1: A child that lives with acceptance and friendship learns to find love in the world.

LL: Okay, Connie how is that better?

CONNIE WALKER: Well they changed the focus of the AIM program to include all hard to place children, so including children who are differently abled. I mean they admit that despite this change that most of the kids were still First Nations and Metis kids, the slight name change. But you know obviously still disturbing to people like Alison Stephenson. She's a historian from the University of Virginia who has studied the AIM program.

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I think it's really telling about the attitudes at the time that race would be considered a disability. And it's part of that equality rhetoric. I think that's prevalent at the time that Indigenous people are just another marginalized minority in the Canadian mosaic. Indigenous children are just another marginalized minority amongst other disabled children. But it still apologizes Indigenous children.

LL: Given the opposition and what we know now, what does Otto Dreidger that child welfare director in Saskatchewan we heard from earlier; now say about this program that he started?

CONNIE WALKER: You know I think that Otto acknowledges some of the difficult stories and the devastating impacts that he's heard from survivors of the Sixties Scoop, but he also defended the program and said that there are success stories. You know he understands why survivors are upset. But I asked him if he had any regrets about the AIM program and this is what he said.

SOUNDCLIP

I wouldn't say regrets. I say I have mixed feelings because one of the things that we were discussing a lot is how much neglect or abuse of children do you tolerate in families before you take children from the family. Whether we got that right in terms of when we took children from homes rather that left them in the homes, that's the question. And that's why I see mixed feelings. I don't know. I feel that we try to be as conscientious in looking at the welfare of the child. And then sometimes abrogates the rights of the parents. My suspicion, I haven't got research for this, but my suspicion is that we now tolerate more neglect and more abuse in families and not just Aboriginal families - I mean all families - than we did in those days. And whether we were right or whether it's right now is a question.

CONNIE WALKER: So I mean Otto you know obviously has mixed feelings about his role in the program but we spoke to a couple of other people who were associated with the program and no one says that they fully regret it, or that they regret their involvement in this program. We spoke to a retired social worker who didn't want to be identified. And she really wanted to make the point that they obviously had the best of intentions that they were encountering situations where children were put in terrible positions. And that they felt that they were doing the best for children at the time. She actually said I would hate to be judged today by the practices of the 60s. So she acknowledged that there has obviously been a shift. There's greater recognition around the importance of trying to keep families together, the importance that children are taught their language and culture. Actually all of them took issue with the term Sixties Scoop. You know she said it's not like someone is out for a Sunday drive picking up kids that they were sometimes dealing with life and death situations and that crappy decisions were made with the best of intentions.

LL: Those are her words, crappy decisions made with the best of intentions. Well it's interesting because it depends on your perspective. The people working in the program defend it as having good intentions but that is not how everyone looks back on what happened in the 60s and 70s.

CONNIE WALKER: Yes. Raven Sinclair is an academic - a Cree academic from Saskatchewan -who comes at this with an interesting perspective as a social worker who now teaches and studies social work and she also studies issues around Indigenous identity and adoption. And she herself was apprehended by social workers when she was 4 years old.

SOUNDCLIP

I know what was happening in my own family was that Saskatchewan didn't have the same social safety net that they do now you know across the country. So my mother was living with her sister in Saskatoon. There must be between 10 and 15 kids at that time in one house. We left on the west side which is now a high population of indigenous people but then there wasn't. So I think we were sort of faced with a fair bit of racism as well. One day when they were out social services was called we were just doing what our families have done forever. You know our siblings are taking care of us and I mean as a kid I thought my sister was my mum because she took care of me, my older sister. My dad had died. You know we were in poverty, pretty intense poverty

CONNIE WALKER: So Raven says you know she was apprehended and eventually adopted into a white family as well

LL: And for her looking back on it now why does she think it was happening so much?

CONNIE WALKER: She talks a lot about cultural bias and the understanding or the lack of understanding by people involved in child welfare at the time, the lack of understanding about Indigenous communities and about culture and you know that they were coming at it from a specific lens and imposing their cultural beliefs on Indigenous families and communities. As well as you know not a great understanding about what was the current situation in the time in terms of the generational effects of residential schools.

SOUNDCLIP

So we have this growing population of educated social workers from universities but you know coming out with sort of a very particular cultural and class mindset. I think that many of these people even nowadays you know I encounter this with great regularity that most social workers in training have never been to a reserve. They wouldn't know about hunting and gathering if their life depended on it. And yet so many of my friends and relatives, that's still what we do. So encountering you know people living in poverty on reserves which is a very distinctive culture that's you know back in the 60s would have been so foreign to the social workers, and that was just a recipe for disaster I think, good intentions but incredible ignorance and naivety. How could they even consider things like you know the residential schools and the impact of residential schools when they weren't even taught about it. Only the most astute would have had an inkling of really what was going on that created these conditions.

CONNIE WALKER: And you know we found that those kinds of attitudes weren't just at the social worker level. You know we spent days in the Saskatchewan archives and we came across a memo from the director of Child Welfare in North Battleford to the director of the aid program, and it was called sales person of the year award. And it was the director of AIM congratulating the social worker North Battleford because she had 17 court dates coming up and she's going to be getting a big number of kids in care. And you know she wrote a memo to the director of the AIM program talking about having blue eyed ones, brown eyed ones, every age, every color. And he wrote back saying you know congratulations it's unanimous by the AIM centre staff that you'll be getting the sales person of your word. It was obviously a joke but you know they seemed to be joking about the number of kids that they were apprehending in order to bring into care.

L: Now it seems insensitive that the children are being treated more like commodities than children which reflects back to the ads - one of your guests was talking about being treated as pets.

CONNIE WALKER: Well that's the thing. So Otto and the other social workers we talked about they said that the goal of the AIM program was never to adopt kids into white homes, that the goal of the program was to find permanent homes because they knew that children who spent years in foster care often ended up with bad outcomes. And you know we did find some reference in the archives that they did try to do some outreach with First Nations. But the majority of the homes that kids ended up in were white homes. There seems to have also been a financial motivation you know that having a large number of Indigenous kids in care meant paying foster families over several years. There was a study done two years after the AM program that said you know adopting out 100 kids as opposed to fostering them saved the government tens of millions of dollars. So you know there are questions about what the motivations were by bureaucrats and governments at the time.

LL: Well given all that then what do we know about how the adoptions turned out?

CONNIE WALKER: Well we spent a number of days in the Saskatchewan archives in Regina looking through banker boxes worth of material and going through government memos at the time. And we found a study that was done between 1976 and 1978 that showed even at that time the Saskatchewan government knew that these adoptions were more likely to break down. The adoptions of children who were Indian and Metis accounted for 88 percent of all of the adoptions that broke down. And despite knowing that the Saskatchewan government still didn't make that connection. They didn't connect those breakdowns to race. They blamed it on the fact that many of the Indigenous kids were older when they were adopted. And now Raven and other academics are studying the success rate of these adoptions and they know that about 50 percent of these adoptions broke down by the time these kids were teenagers. And that's certainly something that we also found with this Semaganis family with Cleo and her siblings. Her brother Johnny was sent to a home in Lancaster Pennsylvania and he became homeless when that adoption didn't work out. Her two sisters Annette and April ended up on the streets of Toronto at 13 years old each. I think that we're also learning about the outcomes of this in the news and the news stories in with this law suit that was launched by survivors against the federal government and acknowledgment of how devastating it was for these children to be separated from their families, their communities and their culture.

LL: And when you talk about breakdown you talk about the children leaving the home. That's what break down means.

CONNIE WALKER: Yes that these adoptions were failed adoptions..

LL: And they all ended up on the street?

CONNIE WALKER: Well no not necessarily. But the study now by Christopher Bagley says that 52 percent of these adoptions broke down and various things happened but certainly some devastating consequences for children who were left to fend for themselves at really young ages.

LL: So how different is the system back then to what's happening today?

CONNIE WALKER: Well that was I mean one of the most maybe surprising or unsurprising things depending on how you look at it is how little has changed in 40 years. When you're talking about the number of Indigenous kids that are in the child welfare system today it's actually gotten worse. I think that maybe what's different now is that you know following the settlement announcement with 60s Scoop survivors now the government acknowledges that it is wrong to take kids and not to help preserve their culture and identity. It's been called a humanitarian crisis by the Minister of Indigenous services Jane Philpott. But there are so many parallels to what we found happened to this one family in the 1960s and 70s into what is continuing to happen today. There is a community in Labrador where one third of the kids, about 80 children, are in foster care in non-Indigenous communities. In Manitoba, ninety percent of the kids in care are indigenous. I think that one aspect of this that is really important for people to remember is that while there is acknowledgement from government today about how wrong it was to take kids from their homes and to have them grow up without their culture language and identity, that there hasn't been as much done to deal with the prevention. So why is this happening, you know that children are being taken from homes still today because of poverty, because of housing issues and because of the legacies of residential schools and the issues that are associated in that communities are still grappling with across the country.

LL: Those are the really tough issues. So what is the solution?

CONNIE WALKER: Well there is no magic bullet. You know Alison Stevenson who we heard from earlier is calling for a new national law. She points to something that happened in the United States called the Indian Child Welfare Act. It gave communities and tribal governments responsibility for child welfare traditions. And she thinks that's something that could work here, a federal law that protects Indigenous families and supports families to stay together. But that's again as we say that's trying to tackle the harder stuff. And do you get a sense from your work on this file that there is that commitment to doing that?

CONNIE WALKER: Well this is I mean I think that's a huge question right. This government had some emergency meeting earlier this year to deal with this. It's been called a humanitarian crisis but we are really seeing so many parallels to what this one family went through and what is continuing today. And when you're doing this work I mean we spent a year investigating this one story about this one family. But as soon as you scratch the surface you realize how interconnected all of these issues are, that this is not just a story about a girl who went missing or who was murdered. This is a story about the impacts of child welfare and how they're echoing in communities across the country. This is a story about the intergenerational effects of residential schools. This is a story about the lack of basic infrastructure that indigenous communities grapple with every day, the lack of housing, poverty. And I think that you know when we're talking about what's changed or what hasn't changed what needs to change, that part of that focus needs to be shifted toward dealing with some of these other issues that we know are contributing to this over-representation of Indigenous kids in care.

LL: Really good work Connie as always thank you.

CONNIE WALKER: Thanks for having me.

LL: Connie Walker is the host and writer of Missing and Murdered: Finding Cleo, an original CBC podcast episode 6, 7 and 8 are being released today and we'll link to her podcast from our website at cbc.ca/thecurrent. Coming up in our next half hour seven years of war in Syria plenty of despair. Journalist Rania Abouzeid brings us a few glimmers of hope as well. I'm Laura Lynch. You're listening to The Current.

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Rania Abouzeid spent years with the people of war-torn Syria. Her new book tells their story

Guest: Rania Abouzeid

LL: I'm Laura Lynch and you're listening to The Current. This month marks seven years since the start of the civil war in Syria. The human cost of the conflict has been staggering. Estimates say nearly half a million Syrians have died, over a million more have been injured and nearly 12 million people have been displaced. And the war rages on. Yesterday at least 35 people were killed in a rocket attack on a Damascus market in government held territory just outside the capital. A major Syrian army offensive against rebel groups in Eastern Ghouta continues with over a thousand civilians killed and nearly 50,000 having fled. And in the north the city about Afrin has reportedly fallen to Turkish forces and Turkish-backed Syrian rebels after a two month long ground and air offensive that led to another massive displacement of civilians. The Kurdish militia there says it will continue its fight with guerrilla tactics. It is a complex conflict that has laid bare sectarian and ethnic divisions within Syria and has become a proxy for global powers. Journalist Rania Abouzied who has written for publications including The New Yorker and The Guardian has covered the conflict from the very beginning and she's gathered her stories from Syria in a new book No Turning Back: Life, Loss and hope in Wartime Syria. Rania Aouzeid is in our London England studio. Hello.

RANIA ABOUZEID: Hello Laura.

LL: What compelled you to cover the war in Syria?

RANIA ABOUZEID: I had covered the uprising in Tunis here and then later Egypt and my editor at the time asked me if I wanted to go into eastern Libya where rebels there were making gains. And I told them that I wanted to go to Damascus and I wanted to see what was happening in Damascus because I knew that whatever happened in Syria how it reacted or didn't react to these tumultuous events in the Middle East was going to change the Middle East. And so I made my way to Damascus in February 2011.

LL: You were there even before people knew that it was a war.

RANIA ABOUZEID: Well it didn't start off as a war. I recall that it started off very timidly with peaceful protests and in February I was in the capital Damascus and witnessed some of the first earliest attempts to test the boundaries of what protesters could get away with, with regard to the regime. Let's not forget that Syria at the time was governed by a state of emergency that had been in place since the 1960s. And one of the things that that meant was that public gatherings were outlawed except those that were sanctioned by the state. So in late February I was outside the Libyan embassy and I watched what was then a relatively large group of about 200 people trying to protest in front of the embassy in solidarity with protesters in Libya.

LL: And what happened?

RANIA ABOUZEID: It was violently broken up and that's where the book starts

LL: And from then on Syria spirals downward into civil war and just months after the war began in 2011 you were branded a spy by the Syrian regime. Why?

RANIA ABOUZEID: It was still in the days of the protest movement when that happened. Recall that it didn't really become a war until much later. I don't know why to be honest. I just learned that my name was on a list and that I was wanted by three of the four main intelligence agencies banned from entering the country and branded a spy for several foreign states. And all of those things still exist in terms of the claims

LL: That still exists to this day.

RANIA ABOUZEID: Yes they do.

LL: And it has never stopped you from going back in.

RANIA ABOUZEID: No.

LL: How much time did you spend in Syria in the ensuing months and years?

RANIA ABOUZEID: Goodness! I need to sigh before I answer that question. [Laughter] So much time that I wasn't sure what was my real life and what was my reporting life anymore. The two were melting. For years I spent about three weeks of every month either inside Syria or on the border trying to get in. So it was very intensive reporting, for years.

LL: And I think something that listeners might be curious to know is it's difficult enough for journalists to work in a war zone. How are you managing to do your job under those circumstances and not be found out?

RANIA ABOUZEID: Well the arrest warrants from the ban and all of that locked me out of Damascus. It looks me out of government held areas and it meant that I couldn't easily operate there. Although having said that I did manage two trips one in 2013 and one in 2016 to try and cover some of that part of the story. So it meant that I had to focus on the rebel side and to enter the rebel side, from 2011 onwards, meant crossing or being smuggled across the Turkish border into northern Syria.

LL: And how did that affect your experience of the conflict then being really only able to cover that side of it?

RANIA ABOUZEID: As a journalist I want to talk to everybody I want to paint as vivid and as a broader picture as I can of the conflict and I would have done that but I was locked out of one side. However having said that I did try and there is an account in the book of two sides of a front-line where I do outline the experiences of some people who were on the other side, on the other side geographically not necessarily politically.

LL: The other the other part of this is though that you were able to gain the trust of people there and move among people there because you look Arabic, you speak Arabic, you are and your heritage Arabic. How much of a difference do you think that made to your ability to tell these stories?

RANIA ABOUZEID: As the Syrian conflict spiralled and it became harder for journalists to cover and more dangerous for journalists to cover when we started getting picked up and kidnapped, and that happened early in the conflict, in 2012, my ability to physically and culturally and linguistically blend in meant that - and the fact that I move around very low profile, I moved by myself with a small you know I don't have security, I don't have translators, I don't have fixers. I almost never have a photographer except for once when I worked with CBC on a documentary. So being low profile and looking the way that I am meant that I wouldn't get that second glance at the checkpoints because they just assume that I was from the area. And that was all well and good until I open my mouth because I speak Arabic with a Lebanese accent and given the fact that Lebanese parties were active in Syria- We have Lebanese Hezbollah which was fighting with Assad's forces and we have Hezbollah's domestic Lebanese rivals who are supporting the opposition. So that led to new claims of being a spy, this time for one side of the Lebanese political divide or the other.

LL: So how did you contend with that?

RANIA ABOUZEID: It was it was difficult and it was challenging but after a while people came to know me and they came to know that I was who I said I am and I was doing the things that I was doing. It's surprising you know often when that charge came up there'd be a man in the room who would pipe up and say No I saw her on this front line. She is who she says she is.

LL: Now your book is constructed with narratives from several different people and you follow them throughout the war. And it's a display of the thing that you said is the fact that you practically were living in Syria throughout all of this. I want to talk about a couple of the people who you focused on the book. Who is Suleiman and why did you need to include his story?

RANIA ABOUZEID: It was very difficult to choose whose stories I was going to tell because I knew so many people so intimately that I could have you know presented another book with the same structure with completely different characters. But I chose characters whose stories illuminate larger truths which as journalists were always trying to do. They are individuals but by following what happens to them you can understand an element of the Syrian crisis. Suleiman was a very wealthy, very privileged young man in 2011 and he became a protester. And if you follow his trajectory you get some sense of what the protesters were up against. But the other requirement, prerequisite if you like, when I was trying to choose a character as was also that either some people were affected by the events and what was happening, and others affected the events and they were critical. They were either in key places or they participated in key battles or made key decisions. In Suleiman's case he was caught up in the events that were happening around him in his home town of Rastan. And the reader follows him and people like him for a number of years to see what one experience of the Syrian conflict looks like.

LL: What should it tell people about the condition of Syria before the war that someone from comparative comfort and privilege winds up being caught in the resistance to the Al Assad government?

RANIA ABOUZEID: I think that that's something that we have to keep in mind and not just with a peaceful protest like Suleiman but even when we talk about Islamist movements. There is this misconception that it's only the poor, it's only the underprivileged, it's only men and women who have nothing to lose who are involved in things like this and that's simply not the case.

LL: That's something that's really about Suleiman story is that technology almost becomes a character unto itself through Simon's story. Can you talk about the degree to which especially in those early days Syrians were using smartphones to convey what was going on?

RANIA ABOUZEID: Yes I mean I think it's been said that the Syrian uprising and later civil war is one of the first YouTube wars. And that was certainly the case. The prevalence of smartphones almost democratized in some ways the dissemination of information. You didn't need CNN to be there to see what was happening. You didn't need the big legacy newspapers to be able to disseminate your information. However having said that the clips were only ever a snippet of what was happening and we as journalists are always looking for more information. I mean I personally one wanted to be there because a snippet isn't enough. I want to know about what happened before that short piece of video was captured and what happens after. Who was capturing it? I want to zoom out in every sense to see the bigger picture in order to understand the smaller.

LL: Another really compelling character in your book might not be a combatant at all but she does experience war at the beginning of the book. She's a nine year old girl. Who was Ruha and what is her story?

RANIA ABOUZEID: I wanted to show war from the perspective of the family and Ruha, as you say, was nine and in 2011 and she was just such a wonderfully smart young girl and she had her own way of processing what was happening around her. And she comes from a family of strong women. And I wanted to present the war through the eyes of a child who was living it. And that's what I hope Ruha's story does.

LL: She starts out, in the book, living in the city of Saraqib in Syria but takes a journey both in her character and in her spirit and physically she ends up in Turkey. Were you there every step of the way?

RANIA ABOUZEID: Almost every step of the way. In the back of the book I have a section on that I've titled 'Notes' where I explain how I know what I know and I hope that that satisfies readers curiosity that's true and that it answers that question.

LL: When you talk about how when she was living in Turkey, Syria was sort of fading into the past for her thanks to a whole new world of cultural influences. Does that seem symbolically important for you? Is it larger than her?

RANIA ABOUZEID: It was only toward the end that that happened when she started to become a teenager and sorts of hairstyles and music video clips started to occupy her mind. But she very strongly clung to the idea of family and to her hometown and that for me was important to convey because in Syria so much of your identity is tied to where you're from. And that this little girl felt that and she felt that loss very intensely was something that I wanted readers to understand.

LL: There is something remarkable toward the end when her father goes back to Syria and actually builds a factory after the city has been bombed. And I wonder if that was a triumph of hope over experience.

RANIA ABOUZEID: Absolutely. And that is the thing that continues to astound me with regard to Syrians that we may look at it and say 'Oh it's hopeless' and the bloodbath continues, and the bloodbath does continue but it's in the small acts. It's in things like going back home and wanting to improve your community despite the war planes in the air. That for me just highlights the resilience of Syrians.

LL: Now you do keep yourself out of the book, largely out of the book as you write and the focus is on the Syrians who you've met, but you're human being. You must have a deep visceral responses to your experience. I wonder if you could tell me a little bit about your reaction to what you saw and the people you came to know.

RANIA ABOUZEID: Yes I chose to keep myself out of this book because I was frankly the least important and the least interesting character. I wanted to focus on Syrians because this is a book about Syria. But certainly as a human being it was very difficult to say some of the things that I saw, to be in a hospital during shelling and to see some of the victims who come in, little children, elderly women, to hear mothers calling out for their sons. It was difficult. And that's sadly the reality day in day out for millions of Syrians.

LL: And yet you keep going back. You're continuing to go back, am I right?

RANIA ABOUZEID: If I can. I will.

LL: It's so dangerous. What is it that keeps compelling you to go back?

RANIA ABOUZEID: Curiosity the importance of the story the home. And you know I mean I will go back to Syria if I can but I'm also covering Iraq and various other places I was recently in Afghanistan. It’s the importance of the stories and I feel that if I can contribute a piece to the jigsaw along with all of my colleagues then I will continue to do that.

LL: Rania, the war in Syria is now entering its eighth year. Did it ever cross your mind, way back in the spring of 2011, that the conflict would grow into what it did and last this long?

RANIA ABOUZEID: No. I'd be lying if I said it did. And the Syrians who I knew they are the ones who I walked with in protests and others, I think I can fairly say that they never imagined that we'd be here eight years later. Some of them are now dead. But I remember in those heady early months how every Friday, and Friday was protest day, every Friday they would think that maybe this week Assad will fall and then it wouldn't happen and they say okay next week. And that continued for many months.

LL: And what do they believe today or what don't they believe?

RANIA ABOUZEID: There's such a sense of disillusionment among many Syrians in the political opposition. Some of them left the fight. And some of them left the fight years ago. The word that kept coming up even from 2013 onward was abandonment. They felt - the ones in the opposition - felt some sense of abandonment from the international community. They felt that their deaths and their lives for that matter it didn't really matter. Yes it's a lot grimmer.

LL: And what do you think? Will we ever have a Syria as we once knew it?

RANIA ABOUZEID: I think Syria has changed and I say in the beginning of the book that it had changed from the very first protest. Something had cracked. Something had broken. It was not going to be the same. So if we look at Syria today- I also say in the beginning of the book that today there are many Syrias. And what I mean by that is if we look at Syria there are parts that the government of President Bashar Al-Assad controls there. There's a Kurdish enclave that was recently attacked as you mentioned by a Turkish-led offensive. There used to be an Islamic State caliphate. There are rebel held areas. It is a very very fragmented place.

LL: And will it ever come back together or will simply exist in this balkanized state?

RANIA ABOUZEID: Well lines on a map are one thing but the bigger question for me is if the communities will come back together and crystal ball gazing is a dangerous profession in the Middle East. So I guess we'll have to wait and see.

LL: How is the condition of Syria today aside from the people, how much destruction in there? This is the other part of it. There is one thing to having people come back. But what is the physical state of Syria today?

RANIA ABOUZEID: Yes I mean there are entire cities that have been reduced to rubble and I'm not exaggerating. There are neighbourhoods where there isn't a building that hasn't been pockmarked by bullets or had its upper floors pancaked on top of each other. So many parts of Syria are mountains of rubble.

LL: So if you can't crystal ball gaze and I understand why, can you offer your own view on what should happen next, on whether the international community should get more involved?

RANIA ABOUZEID: No I can't and I won't because I don't consider that as my role as a journalist. I think that my role as a journalist is to convey what others, namely Syrians in this case, think and hope and want and see and do and to investigate those claims, but not to offer my own views because I'm not for or against one side. I'm there to try and report what's happening.

LL: Out of everything that you have seen over your years inside Syria what sticks with you the most?

RANIA ABOUZEID: Honestly it's all there. All of the stories that I heard and there were so many stories so many books I could have filled with the stories of people and their stories live with me. And it is both a privilege and a responsibility. But they're all there. They're all in my mind.

LL: Has it changed you?

RANIA ABOUZEID: You know I mean I've been doing this for a long time, covering various things, some of them are ugly some of them hopeful some of them wonderful in the Middle East and South Asia for many many years. And yes I think it hardened me as a person to a certain degree. And I think that seeing some of the suffering and some of the immense suffering in Syria - I mean it's almost indescribable - has to change you on some level as a person. I guess that's just- yes I think that's what's happened.

LL: Have you got any sense of optimism?

RANIA ABOUZEID: Yes I do. And the optimism that there's a reason that 'hope' is in the subtitle of the book and that's because hope really springs from from small individual acts. Like as you mentioned Ruha's father went back to Syria to try and build something for his community. And it may seem small and insignificant but that's the building blocks. That's where it starts. That's where it springs from, from people like that.

LL: It is a wonderful book a really intimate look at the lives of people living through this war. Thank you very much for your time and for writing it.

RANIA ABOUZEID: Thank you very much for having me and for reading it.

LL: Rania Abouzeid's new book is No Turning Back: Life, Loss and hope in Wartime Syria. She spoke to me from London, England. But I have a bit of time now to tell you about a discussion coming up next week here on The Current and it could just change the way you think about existence itself. Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, says he believes it's very likely the world we're living in isn't real. Instead he thinks it's likely that we're actually in a computer simulation powered by artificial intelligence and high powered computing. It may sound like he's watched the Matrix one too many times but he's actually not alone in thinking our reality is actually virtual. Now why would people think this? NASA astronomer Richard Terille explains.

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It really goes back to a very very peculiar property of the universe that we live in and that is that it is computable. Science itself is this process of- we think it's a process of understanding the clockwork behind how the natural world works. The reality of it is that because of very very peculiar property that the universe has, the fact that it conforms to mathematics, science is really the discovery of this underlying mathematical nature that predicts the way the natural world behaves. And that really allows all of us scientists to do our job but we are discovering this mathematical framework. But because the universe conforms to this, the very very peculiar property it has is that you can simulate the universe with a series of equations you can carry around in your pocket. And what's more you could simulate the universe on a computer much smaller than the universe. We already have that kind of ability, the technical ability to do that. We believe that everything that we see in science including very very complex things like evolution, like biology, like even self awareness and consciousness are all couched in this idea that it can conform to science, conform to mathematics. So if we look toward the future we now have the ability to create simulations of the universe. We see them in our video games. We see them in in many many different aspects of our lives. And the idea is just extrapolating a little bit into the future we would probably be able to simulate sensory real environments that are indistinguishable from the reality that we see. And if we're able to do that then it's reasonable to think that in the very near future we will have the ability to digitally live within these simulations. The great question is - it is certainly possible to create simulations - the question is 'Is it probable?' If you believe that in the near future we'll be able to create these sensory real simulations, then you can ask the question well what's the probability that we are within a few decades of being able to do this and not over that time. In other words might we not be a few years a few decades in the future reality and actually living in one of these created simulations.

LL: ANNA MARIA TREMONTI we'll be back with that mind expanding conversation next week on The Current. Well that is our program for today stay tuned to Radio 1 for Q. This weekend we'll see the Bare Naked Ladies inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame as part of the 2018 Juno Awards and the band will be reuniting on stage for the first time since 2009 with former lead singer Stephen Page. Today on Q Stephen Page joins Tom Power to talk about the bands beginning, what songs he's most proud of and how he's feeling about being back on stage with the Bare Naked Ladies. And remember you can always take The Current with you to go on the CBC Radio app. It lets you browse through our past episodes start listening in just a few seconds and you can search for any stories that you missed or you want to hear again. You can also listen live to your local CBC station right from your smartphone or your tablet, hear the day's top stories, make your own playlist of your favourite stuff to listen to later. It is free from the App Store or Google Play. And finally Connie Walker was my guest earlier in today's show to talk about some of the backstory to her podcast Murdered and Missing: Finding Cleo. If you haven't heard it yet then be sure to track it down. You can find it wherever you get your podcast and we will link to it from our site at cbc.ca/thecurrent. We are going to leave you today with the opening moments of Missing and mMrdered: Finding Cleo - Episode 1. I'm Laura Lynch. Thanks for listening to The Current

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VOICE 1: [indistinct Cree word] It's almost like [wa - t - qe]. [Indistinct Cree speech]. Can I hear it again

VOICE 2: [Indistinct Cree phrase]

VOICE 1: [Repeats Cree phrase]

VOICE 2: [Indistinct Cree phrase]

VOICE 1: There's a phrase in Korea that I've been practising. [Repeats Cree phrase word by word] I'm not a Cree speaker but my dad was and I took a few classes in university. So I learnt some of the basics. 'Tensei' which is hello. 'Pe-yak-ni-so-ni-sto' One-two-three. 'Atim' is dog. Clearly I'm not fluent. But after months of working on this story I really wanted to start this season with this Cree phrase;[Cree phrase]. It literally means something wanting it as in wishing or longing for something. I wanted to learn how to say that in Cree because for the last several months I've been immersed in the story of a Cree family from Saskatchewan, a family where nearly every single person that we've talked to has endured a lifetime of longing. [Cree phrase], longing for a home and a culture they lost, longing for healing from childhood trauma, longing for answers to lifelong mysteries, longing for the love of a family they were taken from as children, longing for a sister who was lost.[Cree phrase].

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Wednesday March 21, 2018 Full Text Transcript

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